


The Well-Wishing Adventurer

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, M/M, Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:04:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mal is just another guy with loves of comfort and despair</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Well-Wishing Adventurer

**Author's Note:**

> The numbers are the Shakespeare sonnet from which the quotes are taken.

_That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows  
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment_ (15)

1\. _From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase_ (1)  
{{Now, if that ain't the goddamnedest thing I've ever seen}} thought Mal (who had seen a few dillies), re-reading the letter for the fourth time after checking that the fifty thousand plat really had splashed into his credit account. Well, maybe it hadn't been much of a splash, considering the shallowness of the account.

 _Dear Captain Reynolds:  
Please don't tell my children that I have communicated with you. We are working tirelessly to clear their records and bring them home, but as you can imagine this is not a simple matter. It may take years. In the meantime, I am very grateful for your efforts on their behalf, and I enclose a small honorarium. I trust it will prove useful in your travels. _

_As I say, the process may consume several years. Simon is not merely our eldest but our only son, and he is by no means an adolescent any more. I am certain that if it were not for these late distressing events, he would have married by now, and perhaps an heir for our house would already have been born. Please exert your influence on Simon to see that he selects a suitable bride and marries as soon as possible. Yours truly, Regan Tam._

This was the part where Mal always broke out into audible laughter. The conjunction of the hilarious idea of his having any influence over Simon, multiplied by the knee-slapper of suitable brides presenting themselves in the Black, was just too much for him.

2\. _Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?_ (8)  
"Yehsooa!" Mal said. "What, a cat slithered itself through the airlock and y'all caught it and tortured it?"

"You're a real card," Kaylee said. "Took me hours to fix up that guitar Jayne won in that euchre game on Dantino."

"I don't think your…ungenerous review was quite fair, Captain," Book said. "My toe was quite inclined to tap, from those tunes that Jayne played."

"Ain't heard you doin' any better, Mal," Jayne said.

River wandered over to the table, where the cause of the argument was now sitting unattended. She picked up the guitar, and crooned uninterpretable words to an orchestra's worth of sad and brilliant notes.

"Awww, Simon, you look miserable," Kaylee said. (What Mal thought was {{you look beautiful}} as the lamplight slid down his cheekbones and clung).

"That was a very popular song," Simon said. "Once. At home."

3\. _If snow be white, why then, her breasts are dun;  
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head __130_

 _ _In loving thee thou know'st I am forsworn,  
But thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing,  
In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn_ 152_

 _That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,  
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly._ (42)

"Hey, you never did tell me any more 'bout what the Guild says about dating," Kaylee said to Inara on a dull afternoon.

"Oh, I suppose it's like the Shepherd's parishioners giving him their confessions," Inara said. "They say that they're sorry for things they've done, even if they're not really sorry but think they're supposed to be. And they say they're never going to do things again that they're barely even decelerated. We're not supposed to become involved with non-clients, or to see former clients socially unless we accept an exclusive license. But, of course, everyone knows that we do. Most of us leave the Guild at forty, you know—a few can stay even longer, but we're taught a real horror of those who try to cling on for too long. Sometimes we want to find someone—not a client!—so we won't be lonely, and sometimes we simply wonder what all the fuss is about."

"And did you?"

"Dear Kaylee! I discovered precisely why they made that rule!"

As a matter of fact, Companion Serra and Captain Reynolds had been intimate on precisely two occasions, one apiece occurring at a particularly low ebb in the life of each of them. Both sessions had been disasters for compound factors, although at least Mal could reassure himself that Inara deployed only a normal female body, with no enhancements other than a yard of silk here or a drop of perfume there. And if she ever had to step foot on the dusty ground, she'd kick up a cloud of dust with her sliver of stiletto heel, just as much as anyone else with a boot.

Of course, Inara knew that nobody ever died from lack of sex (though she could envision the Shepherd, a one-man procession to his cell to dine on stale bread and water when the cake was being handed out). And when there was cake on offer, Jayne would say, "Hey! Cake!" and grab more than his share. If anyone held back, he'd sigh and say it was more of that smart folk actin' dumb talk. Wash, for once, would be in agreement: "This is largely constructed of sugar and lumps of unwholesome fats. There is no badness here." Zoe would trim off one bite's worth with her fork, then smash it to crumbs, because a firefight you waddle into carrying the flamethrower is one firefight you don't leave. Kaylee would always compare any cake to the sorta lopsided one her Mom baked for her seventh birthday, and Simon would always compare any cake to any bakery in Osiris where the classic recipes were flawlessly executed by professionals.

Captain Malcolm High and Mighty Reynolds, of course, would strut into a patisserie, flap his brown coat open, and jab his finger at the owner (she'd be lucky he didn't jab it into a tarte au citron) and yell, "No matter how you call yourself a patissiere, you're nothin' but a common baker! And you can swill yourself all over in fancy Bellerophonese perfume, but you can't wash off the stink of vanilla extract!"

4\. _With Sequent Toils, Our Forwards Do Contend_ (60)  
Simon took a last look at the Official Rulebook of Calvinball, closed his encyclopedia, entrusted it to Inara, and headed down the steps. He assumed that he would be the last picked, so he joined Wash and Zoe. He didn't think they had much of a chance against the River-Jayne-Kaylee powerhouse, but he intended to do his uttermost for his team.

Inara went back to her shuttle to change into pantaloons and a tunic; it would be far too immodest to sit on the catwalk, her legs dangling, to watch the game.

When she came back, she sat down near Mal (although not as near as they had been, many times in the past). "Who's winning?"

"Is that even a question?" he asked, watching Simon's brows contract into a frown as he doggedly continued guarding Jayne as if he wasn't the only person who didn't think that was funny.

5\. _Sweet roses do not so:  
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made.  
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,  
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth._ (54)

Ever since the last drops in the bottle of cologne were wrung out (River fished the empty bottle out of the waste basket and sold it to Kaylee for two dishwashing shifts), Mal noticed that Simon smelled like soap and flowers. Not any specific flower that had ever grown in anywhere's dirt. Simon said that it happened to everyone who spent enough time in operating rooms. The anesthetic gases soaked into their bodies, then breathed out. The longer Simon stayed on Serenity, the balance changed. The smell of soap became more pronounced, as he was reduced to showering with soap that once wouldn't have been applied to the most obdurate of his socks.

When they landed, and they had money in their pockets, and it seemed safe for Simon to venture out, and there was a market, the first thing Simon did was to buy some fruit for Kaylee. The second thing he did was to buy a cake of soap for himself, and one for River. If he had any money left over, and there was a public Cortex booth, he might buy some downloads for his encyclopedia. If not, printed books tended to be either 100 plat or ten centimes apiece, which determined if he bought any.

Very often, the first thing Kaylee did was buy some fruit for Simon. It made as little sense to Mal as most civilities, but he could see why Kaylee would want to visit Civilization even though she didn't want to live there.

Sometimes Mal would flinch, and his hand would go to his gunstock, until he realized that the unexplained object was just one of Simon's white shirts, rinsed clean-ish and spread-eagled on a heat exchanger duct, its arms out as if demonstrating its weaponlessness to the Fed who frisked it. Serenity did not possess such an object as an iron (a Guild servant picked up Inara's clothes for dry-cleaning whenever she had an assignment lasting a day or two), and Simon determined experimentally that this procedure gave better results than spreading the shirt between futon and base, which seemed to pleat the shirts as much as press them.

Once, Mal reached out and touched a translucent place above one elbow of a shirt, and slid his hand along the eggshell texture of the cotton to a scar neatly darned with dental floss.

6\. _Why didst thou promise me a glorious day,  
And make me travel forth without my cloak?_ (34)

"You're just tryin' to save yourself work," Jayne said, as Simon laboriously tested the water in the stone quarry with the portable apparatus he had insisted on bringing along on the picnic.

"Yeah. Like you don't have a personal investment in not getting sick."

"Don't take all day, okay?" Although he had drunk a couple of bottles of beer, chilled by the gorgeous blue water foaming over the rocks, Jayne's whole body felt like a parched throat longing for the water's touch. Kaylee's eyes were round as if the sheet of water was a candy store window mirroring a slum kid's face.

"It seems all right," Simon said, almost reluctantly, and strolled behind a tree to change into the pair of sleep pants he had brought along in case the water was safe to swim in. Inara slipped her embroidered paisley tunic over her head, and folded it, and her pantaloons, and held them down with a rock and her upside-down sandals. Underneath, she wore a modest one-piece bathing suit in dusky purple. She wrapped up her hair in a grape-colored paisley shawl.

Everyone else simply stripped off (Jayne ostentatiously held his hands up, like blinders, whenever Zoe was in eyeshot) and waded in or dove in from the bank or from a rock.

Mal lay on his back on a blanket, its wool a little scratchy on his back but protecting him against the grass and the small twigs and pebbles lurking in it. He didn't feel the need to look at Zoe, except to be happy to realize that he had seen her body so many times, thin as a winter branch stripped of buds, but blooming in full orchard summer now.

7\. _A man in hue all hues in his controlling/And by addition me of thee defeated by adding one thing to my purpose nothing_ (20)

It was a good thing that all that swimming counted toward washing off the crew, turning them into a bunch of happy prunes, because the dirty clothes and used blankets added up to a powerful lot of washing, and the ration meters were well into the red by the time the dishes were washed and the laundry put through the wringer (connected to the graywater line) and hung on the clotheslines in one of the smuggler's nooks.

There was just enough beer left for a quarter of a mug for River and half a mug all around otherwise. Zoe washed out the mugs and bottles and Kaylee took the thick brown bottles to cut down and polish into tumblers that they could use for special occasions, and they all headed off to bed.

For the second time that day, Mal stripped down, and for the second time, rolled up in a reprocessed wool blanket (hard to tell what color it was, other than "dark," with a red or yellow thread meandering here and there). Now that he was alone he could think about not being it, and he closed his eyes and thought about the afternoon. Nine bodies, relaxed in the sunlight, and it was only the two of them with clothes on that looked naked. (Mal assumed that Wash and Zoe were too, now—it didn't take much to spur those two on to pop their snaps and rip their zippers.)

With his eyes closed, he could almost imagine himself floating off the bed, standing next to it, looking down at Simon, as stretched out as a buffet table, and he himself eyeing it as greedily as Kaylee would. And in that vision, Simon's hair was rumpled from knocking against the pillow, and his eyes were lazy instead of sharp.

"You shiny with this? You'll let me do it?"

"Oh, yeah. I think this is one of your better plans…"

And Mal knew that Simon would be not just amenable but demanding. And that was as far as thought would reach, crashing against an unseen barrier. Mal—the real one—opened his eyes, looked at his dry hand and swept it over his unspattered thighs. He did think that his life was screwed up enough that he could manage to jack himself off and fail to notice the orgasm, but this time he was just down for the count, was all.

8\. _No more be grieved at that which thou hast done;  
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud._ (35)

At the mail stop, after profuse consumption of cotton candy ("Y'know, maybe we got the order the wrong way 'round," Mal said, leaving fingerprints on a pile of advertising circulars), many of the crew members were surprised to see that Simon had picked up half-a-dozen boxes addressed to Dr. Jonadab Zerubabel.

"River put shreds of some of Shepherd Book's Bible pages in my shoes," he explained once they were back on Serenity and the boxes had been stowed in the medbay storage cabinets. "There were some…colorful names there. Very inspiring. At least the names were, they pretty much occurred in isolation. And, I, uh, told some pharmaceutical companies that I was setting up a practice, and oddly enough River's random-number generator was able to come up with an unused Drug Supervision Agency number. Next time we hit a place that doesn't have much of a public health infrastructure, I can set up shop and provide basic immunizations. I think it would be fair to charge, oh, three to five plat per injection for those who can afford to pay, and I have several hundred doses in these boxes…"

"What about needles?" Zoe said. "We ain't got but a few in the infirmary, and buyin' 'em ain't legal everyplace."

"These are one-piece injectors, for the Rim market," Simon said. "Good question, though."

"Hey!" Mal said, accurately homing in on the "who can afford to pay" clause.   
"Don't you go givin' too much away, we need that money."

"Which one of us stole this stuff—you or me?"

"Which one of us' boat is this?"

"Yeah," Jayne said quietly, in the background (because he was good at being quiet when he wanted to be, and in the shadows when he wanted to be). "Good question."

9\. _They that have pow'r to hurt but will do none,  
That do not do the thing they most do show,  
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,  
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow_ 94

Dinner was late—after much heavy lifting in a drenching rain—so everyone sheered off right afterwards except for Simon (washing the dishes) and Mal (drying them). There was an inch or so of sludge at the bottom of the granitewear coffeepot, so Mal poured in a little water and heated it up.

After a couple of sips, Simon gave up, clicked down the tin mug, and looked at Mal. He stretched his arm out along the table, leaving his hand up, ready to be clasped.

After a long minute of adjusting various kinds of uncomfortableness, Mal said, "Simon, why're you askin' me? Or not askin'. Why put that on me?"

"Your ship," Simon said implacably.

"Simon, I've thought about this, I've tried, but…lots of ways my upbringing didn't take. Seems like this one, it did."

"That's convenient. Considering the amount of leeway you give yourself on coveting your neighbor's ox."

"Less so on his wife. If you ain't noticed yet, you ain't the kind of person I'm accustomed to havin' to do with—that bein' of the female variety—and I'm more'n' fatigued by your attitude that you know everything and I'm just some…some peasant swineherd you're talkin' to. So if you want to know why you an' me aren't sharin' a bed, then lemme tell ya, it ain't just your dick it's your balls."

Simon laughed, but not scornfully—mostly surprised, and the rest affectionate. And if they were two other people then they might have laughed together, very possibly while happening to embrace.

"Well," Simon said. "That's what you say, but I will not always be denied. I have to be here. I have to spend most of my time in meaningless tedium surrounded by all kinds of ugliness. I have to know what it's like to be hungry and cold and afraid without insulation. But you know what? Even if you don't want me, I don't have to go unsatisfied and I don't have to be alone."

10\. _But when your countenance filled up his line,  
Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine._ 86

 _Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow/For precious friends hid in death's dateless night_ (30)

 _To this I witness call the fools of Time,  
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime._ 124

"You sure you don't mind, Kaylee?" Mal asked, looking at the dusty barn dotted here and there with rust-choked machinery.

"Hells no," Kaylee said. "It's…exciting! Gettin' in on the ground floor, like what it was when you was first gettin' Serenity up off her feet."

His conscience relieved, Mal went to the office, to give Wash's cousin Ephraim a seminar in the art of leadership over some single-barrel bourbon.

Wash, Book, and River had stayed behind, making an unconvincing pretense of thirsting deeply for a Parcheesi tournament. Mal escorted Kaylee back (or, considering who had a steady drip of IV bourbon throughout the day, and who had just a shot at the end of it to settle the dust, vice versa).

Simon and Zoe were next to return, with a jingling cash box. Simon performed the inoculations. Zoe handed out balloons with the mare's leg conspicuously in view in case anybody got some ideas about the cashbox. River ran over to hug Simon and tucked the cashbox under her arm. "Zoe, you look happy," she said innocently.

"All them cute kids…" she began. She was going to stop there, but Wash was up on the bridge. "Seein' em is a tonic."

"You may think we lost Jayne, but we didn't," River said.

"Jayne!" Mal yelled, pissed off at himself for losing count on a number he could manage with his pants buttoned. "Kaylee, see if you can hack into the local chatternet, see if he's been pinched, or been shot up and he's in the hospital. Then if he ain't maybe I'll mosey down to the red light alley and make him wish he'd been. Why can't the stupid bastard stay put for one damn day?"

At that moment, Jayne himself strolled up the ramp, his clothes heavily stained with blood and mud, his hands and face spattered.

"Can you walk?" Simon asked. "Ummm. You are walking. Well, come into the infirmary, I'll check you out."

Mal closed up the ramp and yelled "Why ain't we flyin'?" into the comm. "Don't wait for the Second Coming here, Wash." Mal returned the Shepherd's glare. "And if it happens in the next five minutes, it'll happen just the same if we're flyin'."

''Course I can walk," Jayne said. "Blood mostly ain't mine."

"Oh, of course, now I can do blood-group analysis by sight…"

"Whose is it, then?" Zoe asked.

"You remember Ronny McTeague?"

"Sure," Mal said. "Browncoat. He was in the Ninth Space Cav, then he was in Clutterville camp with Zoe and me for four, six months. Somethin' like that."

"Well, it's his."

Zoe raised an eyebrow. Mal said, "So how's Ronny's blood all over you?"

"Him an' me was jackin' a truck," Jayne said. "Fulla chickens. He had a buyer all lined up and everything. We didn't think the driver was gonna much care, we'd just pull him outta the cab and tie him up and maybe knock him one over the bonce to make it look good. Came out shootin', though. Dunno why he'd care so much about some gorram chickens prolly wasn't even his anyway."

"Go back to the part where you an' him was thievin' buddies," Mal said.

"Oh, well, him an' me kept hittin' the same porno feeds on the Cortex. Name sounded familiar from your yarns, so we went to chatternet. I knew we was gonna swing by here an' he said he had a day job."

"Why didn't one of you reubens mention it to me?"

"Guess we thought that you're too high and mighty for a simple little crime like this one. Or too busy with pansy-ass humanitarian crap. Anway, sure wasn't gonna be enough in it to split with the whole Coxey's Army here."

"What happened to Ronny?" Zoe asked.

"Didn't look good for him, anyways I didn't hang around to see if the trucker called the Fed or the ambulance first or never."

"And you didn't even find out if he was beyond help?" Mal asked, nitrogen-quiet. "I wouldn't leave a man behind, least of all with just one gun on me."

"Like gettin' Browncoats killed warn't your specialty," Jayne said. "'lliance musta carried you on the books as an asset."

By the time Zoe and Simon and the Shepherd pulled the combatants apart, Serenity was out of atmo anyway and there was nothing to be done about it until the next stop, if then, because Jayne happened to catch Mal at a time when he was disinclined to plain flat-out murder within his crew.

At two a.m., Zoe poured the last four ounces of home-brew into a mug and chugged half of it. "Thought you might need a little help in avoidin' acute alcohol toxicity," she said.

"You're a prince among women," Mal said. "Where'd it all go, Zoe? Havin' a handle on things happenin' and some kind of notion about folks."

"Good to know you thought you had some of that to lose, Sir," Zoe said.

11\. _Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won;  
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;  
And when a woman woos, what woman's son  
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed?_ (41)

 _So him I lose through my unkind abuse.  
Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me;  
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free. __134_

There was music again—this time, from a tinny Podplay—and River was teaching Inara the St. Alban's quikjaz, to an appreciative audience of Simon, Wash, and the Shepherd.

Mal wasn't fooled by the manifest content of the two women bouncing across the deck to a lively beat. He knew what he was really seeing was Simon murmuring into Inara's hair, gliding together in a slow dance that was a Baptist's nightmare.

He could see their faces. He could see the way Simon and Inara looked at each other. He knew what desire looked like on those faces because he'd thrown it away.

Mal guessed one angel in the other's hell, which was all right with him from the viewpoint of his special one.

ALL HAPPINESS AND THAT ETERNITY PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH


End file.
